Study: 100 Billion Alien Planets

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Updated Apr. 21, 2017 1:44PM ET / Published Jan. 03, 2013 10:10AM ET

NASA, via AP

This means the truth must be really out there, right? A new study released Thursday suggests that our Milky Way galaxy houses at least 100 billion alien planets, and possibly even more. That numbers one planet per star. Researchers from NASA made the estimate after studying a five-planet system called Kepler-32, which is thought to be representative of the galaxy’s many other planets. “I usually try not call things ‘Rosetta stones,’ but this is as close to a Rosetta stone as anything I’ve seen,” says John Johnson, one of the study’s authors. “It’s like unlocking a language that we’re trying to understand—the language of planet formation.”